Publicis Wish List Creates 100,000 Personal Thank You Films With Help From AI

Last year, the video took a more serious turn, with the film raising awareness about the human papillomavirus (HPV), while still having some fun along the way. This year, Publicis skipped the holiday video in favor of an experiment with AI that found the Groupe creating 100,000 personal thank you Wish List films for its employees, and the ambitious project may have practical uses for clients as the technology progresses at a rapid pace.

The films all start with Sadoun talking about 2023 being a year of firsts for Publicis in the holding company world—first in organic growth, first in all financial KPIs, first in new business, first in ESG, first in market cap. He then says he wants to thank each employee individually, which he regrets isn’t possible—until his AI twin enters the room.

AI Sadoun tells the real one that it is indeed possible, through AI, to individually give thanks to each employee. He uses Eva, a sport-loving Groupe managing partner living in Austria, as an example, showing off his (fake) tattoo and talking fluently in German. Carla Serrano, Publicis Groupe chief strategy officer, then enters and is seen climbing a mountain, playing tennis and dancing ballet… or is she?

Another video finds Lévy in various guises, first as a wakeboarder then as a skydiver, and finally as a cowboy with a lasso.

Blending technologies

Coming up with 100,000 personalized messages with video and voice was no easy feat. The Publicis teams worked with numerous technologies to bring the project to life.

“This was a passion project internally for us, of personalizing these messages,” Serrano told Adweek, adding that Sadoun had come to the team to ask if it could be done, which had them embark on a three-month journey through the world of AI to make it happen.

Thanks to Publicis’ ability to gather and connect information about its people through its platform Marcel, everyone that works at Publicis will be sent a personalized thank you that is relevant to their interests and passions.

According to Serrano, Publicis uses ChatGPT often for spec work and storyboards, but when it comes to video, it’s still too unstable and the narrative structure doesn’t have continuity, and to personalize at scale is pushing the boundaries of the current technology.

Knowing that they needed help with the project, Publicis looked to Nvidia and OpenAI, along with ElevenLabs for languages and translation, HeyGen for training voices, Runway for video creation and training, and several other tech companies that were able to work at the grand scale that Publicis needed.

“Across this entire journey, which has been a huge learning curve with stops and starts, we’ve worked with different tech companies, and sometimes we’ve had to swap them out because they couldn’t scale,” said Serrano.

Andy Bird, founding partner and CCO at Le Truc, added that stitching the various independent technologies together to make cohesive messages was the biggest challenge.

“When we were working on this project, the technology was literally evolving as we were doing it, so next month we could do this a lot quicker,” said Bird.

The fact that the technology moves that quickly also means the current iteration still has some glitches. Occasionally the faces morph a bit, there are some voice inconsistencies, and some jokes may fall flat in translation, but the overall effect should impress most employees.

Practical applications for clients

More than 100 people globally within Publicis touched this project, spanning agencies including Le Truc, Saatchi & Saatchi Canada, PXP, Prodigious and Harbor, which means the team now has the knowledge and the connections to be able to take the learning to its clients.

“Understanding what the technology can do for us, for our storytelling capabilities, has been really interesting. And also, some of our teams who are worried about the future of AI aren’t so worried anymore, when you work with it and you see it’s a tool, it’s not a replacement,” said Bird.

Serrano said the tech companies promised new generations of the technology within three months, which means more stable videos and better applications for clients.

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“For the longest time, our whole industry and all our clients have been asking for personalized content. ‘Can I actually create personal content for prospects and customers in a cost efficient and creative way?’ And the answer has been up to this point, no, but we are very close to be able to say yes,” said Serrano.

Serrano added that a lot of their clients know that they are doing this initiative and most of them want to see how quickly it can happen as a commercial offering. She believes they are going to see it this year.

While it was a huge challenge to pull off, the project was still a fun one for the team, from going into the studio and moving and speaking so the machines could learn from them, to entering in images so the machines could generate thousands of iterations.

Serrano is glad Sadoun pushed for the project to happen since it prepared the team for real world applications.

“I’m glad that we were pushed. … Give us an AI project in the real world for clients and we’re ready,” said Serrano.